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After death

About This Item

  • Title: After death
  • Date: Mid-1850s
  • Creator(s): Walt Whitman
  • Whitman Archive ID: uva.00133
  • Source: Papers of Walt Whitman (MSS 3829), Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia. Transcribed from digital images of the original. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the manuscripts, see our statement of editorial policy.
  • Editorial note: This manuscript was probably written in the mid-1850s. The lines beginning "After death" are not known to have been published in Whitman's lifetime. The lines on the verso, beginning "I have all lives," are likely related to the poem first published in the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass as "Poem of The Sayers of The Words of The Earth" and ultimately entitled "A Song of the Rolling Earth." Because the handwriting is similar on the two sides, we have included them both here as a single text.
  • Cite this page: Whitman, Walt. "After death." The Walt Whitman Archive. Gen. ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, & Kenneth M. Price. Accessed 24 April 2024. <http://www.whitmanarchive.org>.
  • Source File: uva.00133.xml (TEI)

Key

Textual Feature Appearance
Overwritten brown with strikethrough
Added inline purple with double underline
Uncertain gray with wavy underline
Supplied from another source turquoise with brackets
Metamark green with triple underline
Long deletion gray background with top and bottom border
  [begin leaf 1 recto]

After death.

Others hold levee in life,— ^After death ^Now ^when I am looked back upon, I will I hold  
  I levee, after death, I lean on my left elbow—I  
 take ten thousand lovers, one  
 after another, by my right hand.—   [begin leaf 1 verso] I have all lives, all effects, all  
 causes, all germes, invisibly  
 hidden in myself, This is the earth's word—the round  
 and compact earth's, I and the earth th truth are one, we are  
 curiously welded,
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